My connection is down! Make haste!

Yesterday my internet connection went down. It had been flaky for a few days. I have Comcast, as does my next-door neighbor. So I walk over and ask him if his connection is down, but his connection is up. We're on the same network segment so I know it has something to do with my cabling or modem.

So I take the splitters out of the mix and connect the modem directly to the cable coming off the street, still nothing. The "send" light flashes, the "online" light is out. I call Comcast and they tell me they are getting no signal on their end from my modem, and there are no reported outages. I try it with and without the splitter and get a different result each time on either side of the splitter. The modem is six years old. So I go out and get another cable modem. They aren't cheap. I plug that in, same thing.

Then my neighbor calls. His connection is down, as is his neighbor on the other side, who also has Comcast. Wish I had known that sooner. He says they won't be out until 2 PM Tuesday.

I call Comcast back and lo and behold; there are five people on our street with no connection. The truck was there within the hour and the connection was back up (with the old modem) about half an hour later.

(I wanted to go out to the Comcast guy and say, "Don't you realize Wrath of The Lich King comes out Thursday? Hurry! Make haste!") *

No big disaster because I've been wanting to get a spare cable modem to troubleshoot customers' connection issues anyway, so no loss.

Troubleshooting these things is a lot more fun when I'm getting paid for it. I love the Internets.

* I would never actually say "make haste".